cfp.english.upenn.edu

During Captain Cook’s 1769 transoceanic voyage, he collected a rust fungus in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. That rust fungus was carried around the globe until it returned across the Atlantic and the American midwest to arrive at Purdue University’s herbarium where it remains to this day. The journey this rust fungus took reflects the global nature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, full of circulations between continents and islands, specimens and texts, peoples and cultures. Purdue’s Early Atlantic Reading Group invites you to celebrate this interconnectedness through a graduate student colloquium exploring the material and miscellany, pictures and people, literatures and locations of the early Atlantic world.

The colloquium will take place on April 18th and 19th, 2013 and Dr. Nicole Horejsi from Columbia University will be our featured speaker. We welcome individual papers, non-traditional presentations, and constituted panels which deal with the literature and culture of America, England, and the Atlantic World from the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century. We encourage paper and presentation topics
including, but not limited to:

Representations of Nature & the Natural World
Constructions of Nationalism(s) & Creole Experience
Discussions of Science, Medicine & Natural History
Aesthetics and Literary Form
Women’s & Native writings
Transoceanic Studies
Caribbean Literatures
Trans, Circum, & Cis Atlantic or Hemispheric Studies
Print & Material Culture
History of the Book
Media Transformations & Visual culture
Modern Rhetorics

Please send abstracts of about 300 words by December 31, 2012 to Rebekah Mitsein at rmitsein@purdue.edu.
Panels will be finalized and participants notified by no later than January 31, 2013.